I was going to write my blog before I went to bed last night but suddenly it was an hour later – well, it was going to be an hour later, at 2 a.m. –so I went to bed. Now here’s yesterday’s blog and maybe I’ll write one for today or maybe not.

A friend of mine, a few years younger than I, went to look at a “facility”. I’m not sure what to call it. There are so many different levels and services that they are hard to describe. Old Folks’ Home used to cover it but now there is Assisted Living, Senior Citizens’ - Residence? Place? - Nursing Home, Long-Term Care, oh, and then fancy names: Stratton Arms; Normandy House’; Christie Pits – no, that’s a landmark, used to be, in the west end of Toronto. But you see what I mean. My friend was going to check out one of these places, high-end, downtown, with a possibility of subsidy. They are all expensive and they all have huge waiting lists. I have been told that the average length of time a person lives in one of these places is four years. I don’t like that.

My friend has had trouble with her sight and has had to give up her car, a real blow to her self-confidence and sense of independence. I didn’t feel that way at all. I gave up my car before I was eighty and for a reason I’ve said before that makes me sound more eco than thou, but it’s true. I gave up my car to reduce my footprint on the planet. Carbon emissions, you know.

It was a blessing: suddenly I had more money. (Cars cost about $10,000 a year now to run in a city.) And I felt a greater sense of independence because, directionally challenged as I am, I could find my way with public transit with self-confidence. I realized I have been arrogant in my assumption of continuing health and energy (albeit somewhat diminished). My recent leg injury eroded that confidence but not before my ego caused my complications and made me take so long to heal. I tried to keep on doing what I was doing and I wasn’t giving my wound a chance to heal properly (and slowly). I finally acknowledged the fact that I am not “as young as I was” and that I should be more careful. But it never occurred to me that I might have to leave here and my present lifestyle. My friend’s search shook me.

I know, I know. Today is not forever. But I kept hoping that tomorrow is a long way off. Maybe not as far off as I thought. I was taking a few more taxis than was my custom, to accommodate my sore leg and dwindling energy.

Once when the driver dropped me, he asked, “Is that a senior citizens’ home?”

“Yes!” I said. And it’s true; there are a lot of us here, in various states of disrepair. I can’t come to a conclusion, not yet.

I had my appendix out when I was nine years old. I missed seventeen and a half days of school, according to my report card, and I stood third, the first and only time, behind the boy and the girl who usually stood second and third behind me. I received get-well cards and presents, from my parents’ friends and my relatives and school friends and my school class: books and soap and bubble bath , etc., and a box of writing paper. I used all of it writing thank-you letters to the people who had given me gifts. I wrote their names on the envelopes but I didn’t know how to address them and mail them, so the finished letters sat in the writing box.

When I returned to school, so did another little girl who had also been away. The teacher read a letter aloud to the class, a letter from the other little girl thanking them all for their get-well present and card. I died. No letter ever came from me. My letters were still in my writing box, unsent.

That’s why I am an obsessive stickler about thank-you letters. I demand them of myself. I also demand them of other people.

These days you can get away with email thanks and some people manage to do that and in casual cases that works, but not, in my brainwashed opinion, for a real gift.

I am not alone in this.

As you probably know by now (all three of you who read me regularly) I clip and save and read and quote articles I read in newspapers and magazines. I have a whole folder of pieces about thank-you letters. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vogue magazine, writes thank-you letters. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook millionaire, made a recent new year resolution – forget which year – to write a thank-you letter every day. The equivalents of Miss Manners all over North America, regularly urge people to write their thank-yous. Of course, there are other reasons to say thank you: for an unexpected kindness, a thoughtful deed, a generous gesture, a well-performed task, and less commonly now, thanks to email, a good dinner. I’ll allow that, sometimes.

This has been on my mind recently because I have been under house arrest with my leg injury, unable to get to a mail box or post office, so I have been leaning on email.

It’s not the same.

It’s a matter of class.